The Forgotten Dialect:
Our Body Language

Part 9: Mindbody Psychology

* As we learn to integrate emotions into our day to day lives, we begin to naturally make better life choices. As our relationship with our emotions improves, every other relationship also improves.

Releasing the Flood Waters

A useful metaphor would be to imagine ourselves to be a dam along a river. Occasional rain storms are natural and represent the storms of life. They cause the river to swell and we experience this as intense emotions. We learn to control the river by closing the flood gates of the dam, just as we learn to stuff our emotions back in. This successfully hides the effects of the storm downstream, just as we hide the emotions from our awareness. However, we must endure the pressure created by the rising lake. In other words, to create the appearance of happiness, we have to constantly carry the pressure of our undigested emotions. We never get to enjoy the natural calm after the storm. Overtime the dam cannot contain the growing pressure and leaks start springing up in the wall of the dam. These are the physical and mental expressions of our inner turmoil that cannot be digested emotionally. When we go to the doctor or suppress the symptoms, all we do is patch the leaking dam. The pressure has not been released, and not surprisingly, the dam just springs a leak somewhere else (symptom substitution). As long as we ignore the swollen lake on the other side of the dam, we continue to struggle with the endless leaks and fail to see the connection between all the different types of discomfort that arise in our lives. In essence, using the stuff and distract techniques causes us to just trade in one problem for another.

It never occurs to us that opening ourselves to our emotional discomfort is the only long-term solution to this predicament. We continue to struggle with the rising pressure of our undigested stress, unaware we can release all this tension by allowing ourselves to feel, without judgment, these bottled-up emotions. Feeling an emotion is releasing an emotion. The only way we can fully achieve this is by developing our will power to stop trying to control our emotions. If we start to make room for uncomfortable emotions in our life experiences, the flood gates open spontaneously. We first start by catching ourselves while using the stuff and distract techniques and abandoning them. Instead we connect with the emotions that are just beneath the surface. We intend to feel the emotion, instead of thinking about it. In this way, we take an unconscious habit and shine the radar screen of our awareness on it. Next we maintain this connected state, even though it is uncomfortable, until the emotion matures and digests on its own. We will know we have achieved digestion because thinking about the trigger will no longer bother us. We may feel lighter or even be able to laugh about the whole thing.

If we are willing to undertake this challenging task, we slowly gain the ability to open the flood gates, even in the toughest storms. As we learn to do this, we then find that most of our discomfort occurred because we resisted the flow. And we resist the flow because of the stories we tell ourselves about what these emotions mean. With practice we can learn to let our undigested emotions flow without having to revisit painful memories. We validate our feelings, without believing the stories associated with them. With consistent practice our emotions eventually lose their negative meanings. When the storms lose their negative meanings, we realize they are not as bad as we thought. Through first hand experience we see that we have the capability to weather all the storms of our lives and in doing so realize a natural sense of peace and confidence. We also start to experience some of the first periods of genuine peace, playfulness and creativity in our lives. We are finally able to enjoy those natural calms between the storms of our lives because there is no pressure behind our metaphorical dam.

We realize that the storms in life are signs of past undigested stress and we learn to stop blaming the current situation that triggered it. We see that the current trigger was not the real problem. It was just trying to remind us to take care of some unresolved business. And we do this by changing ourselves. In this way, we are the only ones who can have a lasting impact on the quality of our emotional experience. We can spend our whole lives blaming the external circumstances that triggered our emotional upsets. But in doing so, we give away our only chance to improve our experience. By doing this we just create more turmoil and keep trading one problem for another. We continue to send a message to ourselves that we are a victim of our circumstances instead steadily proving to ourselves that we have the strength to weather all circumstances and learn from them. The remainder of this writing is aimed at motivating us of the importance of connecting with our emotional state. And for those of us that are ready to “roll up our sleeves”, this writing will point us to those tools, which through my experience, are most effective in showing us exactly how to do that.